3/15/2008

Before you jump on the Obama Bandwagon...

..take a look at this article from the very-liberal Houston Press. All that legislation that Obama's being given credit for passing in Illinois wasn't really his. From the article:

From that article:

"Then, in 2002, dissatisfaction with President Bush and Republicans on the national and local levels led to a Democratic sweep of nearly every lever of Illinois state government. For the first time in 26 years, Illinois Democrats controlled the governor's office as well as both legislative chambers. The white, race-baiting, hard-right Republican Illinois Senate Majority Leader James "Pate" Philip was replaced by Emil Jones Jr., a gravel-voiced, dark-skinned African-American known for chain-smoking cigarettes on the Senate floor.

Jones had served in the Illinois Legislature for three decades. He represented a district on the Chicago South Side not far from Obama's. He became Obama's ­kingmaker.

Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city's most popular black call-in radio ­program.

I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:

"He said, 'Cliff, I'm gonna make me a U.S. Senator.'"

"Oh, you are? Who might that be?"

"Barack Obama."

Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills."

4 comments:

The facts in the article do not change my view that Obama is the best person for the Presidency right now. If we are looking for pristine candidates, we will never find anyone to run for office. I consider the barefaced lie that Sen. Clinton told about getting shot at in Bosnia to be a much more telling and damning act than this incident. We had enough lies told to us during the current Presidency of your former Governor.

Lol, he is certainly not MY former Governor. I just have the misfortune to live here at the moment. I most certainly didn't vote for him. Ever.

None of the candidates is perfect. In fact, they all suck. America doesn't seem to want an honest, intelligent President, they want someone who looks good and is a good bullshitter. But Obama told a church group a while back - way before he was a declared candidate - that he didn't believe that a woman had a right to choose what to do with her own body in regards to abortion. He's since changed his tune, but I wonder what else he's now lying about to get elected?

In any case, I can't get behind anyone who would deny any person such a basic human right. That has always been my biggest issue with him.

A woman's ability to decide how many children to have and when, without interference from the government, is one of the most fundamental rights we possess. It is not just an issue of choice, but equality and opportunity for all women.

In Illinois, Obama followed the lead of Planned Parenthood on how to vote:

Pam Sutherland, president and CEO of the Illinois Planned Parenthood Council, vouched again in the conference call that Obama’s present votes were made a the request of Illinois abortion-rights advocates.

“It was our strategy from Planned Parenthood,” Sutherland said.

“Sen. Obama was key to that present-vote strategy,” She continued. “He was always gong to be no votes on all of these bills. But we specifically asked him to vote present because he was so respected among his fellow Democrats that, if he did the present vote, they would follow suit. And that ended up being the case. They did follow suit. And not only did many of the Democrats follow suit. So did a couple of Republicans follow suit."

“It actually worked, because the then-Senate President was no longer able to use these votes against candidates in their races,” Sutherland added.

Closest I can find about his answering the question in front of Christians is from his book.

In Barack Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope, he spoke about his encounter with a Christian voter with whom he discussed his views on abortion.

Below is the excerpt.

[An abortion protester at a campaign event] handed me a pamphlet. "Mr. Obama, I know you're a Christian, with a family of your own. So how can you support murdering babies?"

I told him I understood his position but had to disagree with it. I explained my belief that few women made the decision to terminate a pregnancy casually; that any pregnant woman felt the full force of the moral issues involved when making that decision; that I feared a ban on abortion would force women to seek unsafe abortions, as they had once done in this country. I suggested that perhaps we could agree on ways to reduce the number of women who felt the need to have abortions in the first place.

"I will pray for you," the protester said. "I pray that you have a change of heart." Neither my mind nor my heart changed that day, nor did they in the days to come. But that night, before I went to bed, I said a prayer of my own-that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that had been extended to me.